


Optics

by lexyhamilton (ohheichoumyheichou)



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Denial, Depressing, M/M, Mild Gore, Non-Consensual Bondage, Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 04:07:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13379835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohheichoumyheichou/pseuds/lexyhamilton
Summary: Negan won the war. He's gotten his hands on his top prize, and that prize is in his bedroom. Why is everything so unsatisfying, then?





	Optics

**Author's Note:**

> My first writing foray into this fandom.  
> Warning: this isn't a happy fic.  
> At least Carl isn't dead, because I can't bring myself to acknowledge that that is a canon plot point :(

"How's my handsome doing? Did you miss me while I was out?"

Rick stared after him, following Negan's every move as he walked about the room, putting Lucille carefully against the wall near the potted plants, taking off his scarf and throwing it casually on the bed, sitting down on the couch and throwing his legs over the coffee table, unzipping his leather jacket, and tossing his arms behind the back of the couch. Negan rested his head back to look at the ceiling briefly before picking his head up again and meeting Rick's pale blue gaze which hadn't strayed from his person during any of it.

"You still sore with me about what I did to you? You don't think you deserved it, even a little bit, after all the shit you pulled? We've been rebuilding this place brick by brick, but it's taking a motherfucking long time. Wasn't something I'd been planning on wasting resources on for so long."

Rick said nothing in return. He never did. He'd given Negan the silent treatment ever since he got chained up to the wall in this bedroom, and Negan didn't want to admit that it was killing him-- that this was yet another punishment from this stubborn son of a bitch, in a way. So Negan carried on entire conversations with Rick without ever getting a response, almost out of defiance-- to prove that it wasn't fazing him in the least, and to convince himself he didn't crave real conversation.

Negan had gotten enough of a break, and pulled his legs sideways off the table to spring back to his feet. Even without speaking, there were things Rick could do for Negan to entertain him. He didn't want or need to be cruel to his prisoner now that he had won the war. There was no reason to be. 

Negan walked up to stand right in front of Rick, hands on hips. The chains jangled. Rick never crouched down or turned away when Negan was in the room, and definitely not when he stood before him like that, and that in itself was fucking gratifying—to see that the drive in the former leader of Alexandria hadn't really been changed by his change in fortune.

Rick wasn't wearing what he had been when he arrived at the Sanctuary as a prisoner of war. There was nothing on his upper body, and Negan's gaze lingered over his chest muscles, moving ever so slightly as Rick kept testing the strength of the manacles and chains holding him to the wall. When would he get tired of that futile exercise? Never, Negan hoped.

His eyes traveled further down, where Rick's dick hung limply, swaying slightly when he did move. Aside from his crotch, Rick's legs were encased tightly in the black leather of assless chaps. It was quite a naughty picture, overall. The Saviors managed to collect that particular article of clothing by raiding some unlooted specialty shops, back in the earlier days of the apocalypse. Negan stored them away in his own closet, even though he never imagined wearing them himself—somehow having the premonition that they might come in handy years later. He had never been much for staring at men in the life before all this happened, and still preferred women, but he never discounted the possibility down the road, especially in these strange times. And here it was—Rick Grimes turned his head more than many women, even some members of his current harem. 

Negan loved black. Every wife wore that uniform, and so it seemed fitting that Rick would wear something of the color too, seeing that his only current job was a vaguely adult form of entertainment for Negan. He never did anything hardcore with Rick, never took him like that. It wasn't even for lack of desire, but he never went through with it. When he had just acquired him, Negan tried to toy with him, get him hard, but soon dropped those games. Rick never showed interest, but to be fair to him, never tried to take the fetish-looking outfit off either, and that Negan appreciated.

A sadness swept over Negan again, and he tried to shake it away quickly. He pulled on the chains attached to the wall to force Rick's wrists together and up above his head. It was a clever contraption. Eugene had helped him rig it up, Negan was sorry to say. Sorry because he hadn't particularly wanted to force Eugene to devise the methods for his friend's confinement, but Negan simply couldn't pass up on that engineering mind for this. Eugene had avoided looking at Rick the entire time, and his face showed less emotion than usual when he had finished his handiwork, especially when Negan told him he might have to call him back again for other additions on this project of his.

Negan wasn't a monster. He never kept Rick's arms in that position for long, knowing it would damage him, but sometimes things were more convenient that way, and just for a few moments it was gratifying to see Rick squirming in attempts to lower his arms back. 

Negan reached over and touched Rick's cheek and Rick's head snapped quickly toward him, forcing Negan to draw his hand away, out of caution. "My handsome baby." He trailed his finger down Rick's chest, Rick's gaze darting between his finger and his face, but still not uttering a sound. "Now I know you never wanted to be my fucking prize, but tough luck." 

Rick stared at him, but sometimes Negan didn't like what he saw in those eyes up close. They were such a pale blue, and they'd get a distant look, so that even when he was making eye contact with Negan, it often felt like he was simultaneously somewhere very far away, in his own head.

"You hungry?" Negan asked. He asked that question and would always chuckle at his own joke. Rick didn't need to reply. Negan knew he was. He did feed him. Maybe not as often as Rick would have preferred, freed and left to his own devices, but it was obviously enough to sustain him.

"I know you won't ask me, but let me tell you anyway. I was in Alexandria today." 

Negan paused dramatically, just to see if Rick had any response. Rick's arms strained with effort to pull counter to the chain, craning his neck in discomfort at the position, but not betraying much else. He would be worried, Negan knew that for a fact, but it had also been five weeks since the defeat and subjugation of the communities already. Five uneventful pickups since. Negan hadn't been foolish. He left a few sentries at every community now—loyal, capable soldiers who would radio back to the Sanctuary three times a day to check in. He used to be more trusting of people to be sufficiently afraid, but after this rebellion, no more of any of that. So maybe it was foolish to hope for a reaction of any kind from Rick. They both knew he had won and had everything under control.

"I was there, and I saw Carl and Judith, and your girl Michonne. They're all doing fine. Just peachy, in fact, and brought the goods. I thought I was being harsh taking everything but the bare minimum, but Alexandria's the only community that's managing to scrape up respectable amounts of things. So you should be proud, Rick. Alexandria's in good shape, and in good hands. Your family is managing things without you."

Negan's voice was even, but he felt a tremble. He wanted Rick so badly after all. He grabbed the man by the shoulder and turned him around, slamming him against the wall and holding him there with a forearm across Rick's shoulder blades. Rick's ass seemed blindingly pale, framed by the dark leather around it.

"You don't know how much I want to ride you, cowboy..." he whispered under his breath, holding Rick still to face the wall and expose his ass even as Rick made every effort to twist back around to face him. Something wrenched in Negan's stomach. He acutely missed hearing that sweet Southern drawl, even if most of what he'd heard said in it were angry threats and reluctant, lukewarm concessions. He'd give anything to hear it now, right now, but it wasn't going to happen. There was nothing worth threatening Rick with. In most ways he had been broken. Sometimes Negan wondered if he'd trade losing the war and being taken as Rick's prisoner, just to hear Rick speak to him again. Even if it was to lecture him, chastise him. Negan wouldn't give him the silent treatment. Negan would have tried to chat with him nonstop if their positions had been switched.

Negan reached over to the shelf with a hairbrush on it. Rick never showed any initiative in maintaining himself anymore, so Negan sometimes took over simple duties like combing those curly locks. It wasn't that trivial of a task, with Rick constantly moving his head about, still frantically trying to face him.

"Easy, easy! I'm going to pull your goddamn hair out if you keep thrashing!" Negan's voice rose with annoyance. "Going to shove the handle of this thing up your ass if you don't behave. Maybe not the handle, even."

Someone knocked on the door. Negan sighed and gave Rick a light smack on his ass with the back of the brush before putting it away and loosening the chains, letting him return to his former slack, restoring some range of motion to Rick's arms.

Negan walked over to the door, unbolting it. Frankie was standing in the hallway, nervously playing with her dress strap.

"Simon said you asked for me to come by at six."

"Well shit, and it's six now. Right on time, sweetheart."

Frankie looked beyond his shoulder and Negan knew what she was staring at. He smirked, silently daring her to bring up the subject. She knew not to, but her eyes were filled with a sad kind of distaste and Negan felt his irritation with her rising. She pushed her way inside the room and began undressing. Negan could have sworn she used to do it more seductively than this, but maybe that was before they had a pair of pale blue eyes watching their every move. The chains made a sound, and Frankie turned her head sharply toward Rick again, clearly nervous.

"I've told you, don't mind him, darling. Or d'you feel like he's judging you, the poor son of a bitch?"

"That's funny," Frankie mumbled and obviously tried her best to face away from that particular wall as she positioned herself on the large bed while Negan unzipped himself.

***

Negan rolled over and covered his eyes with his forearm. Thank god for Frankie. Sometimes he'd play around too much with Rick and it'd get him all revved up for nothing. All that day's tension had been relieved, at least.

"Really wish you'd get rid of that thing," Frankie said, somehow more blunt and brave after having done her duty.

"That's fucking rude, Frankie," Negan said.

"I'm serious. This whole room smells like death. It's definitely rotting away, and worse for the wear—"

"Frankie..." Negan groaned. 

"Opening the windows doesn't even help anymore! The bed smells like it—"

"Frankie!" Negan turned over to his side, scowling. 

"To be honest, _you're_ starting to smell like it. It's messed up, Negan, why can't you just put it down and out of its miser--"

Negan clapped his hand over her mouth and nose, and Frankie immediately started struggling for air and grasping at his heavy hand in vain.

"Frankie, you're one of my top three, but you're seriously trying my patience right now."

Frankie's eyes bulged and her fingers kept scrabbling until he released his hand. She stood up, gathering her clothes and quickly putting them on again, throwing a brief glance toward the walker at the wall before heading to the door.

"I'm sorry," she grumbled as she paused in the doorway. "I'm really just worried about you in here, by yourself. Talking to it. I hear you every time I go by this door. That's how people lose it, Negan."

"It's fine, sweetheart. Sorry if the place stinks. I'll have people air it out better, give the upholstery a wash."

Frankie looked at Negan with the kind of sadness that never failed to irk him before finally shutting the door behind her.

Negan got up off the bed with grunt, wiping his dick with a handkerchief as he approached Rick again.

"What are we going to do with you, huh? My girls say you don't smell so fresh anymore... I don't think I notice it as much." He leaned over and drew in a whiff, scrunching his nose a bit.

Hell knew, he had tried to keep Rick clean and pristine. When he was first brought back to the Sanctuary, he was already at death's door, covered in sweat, mud, and blood from the gunshot wound through his abdomen. He reeked while he was still alive. He was barely conscious, and Negan just had enough time to tell him he'd put him up at the walker fence in front of the Sanctuary entrance as one last dig. Rick wheezed out 'go ahead', defiant to the very end. Negan couldn't help himself then, upped the ante-- told him he'd bring his corpse back to Alexandria instead, and tie it at the entrance to his house, guarded by one of his men, so that his kids could have a good look at what their father had become every single day. Negan regretted that now. He regretted that look of pain that crossed Rick's face just as he passed out from blood loss. He shouldn't have been petty. He should have told Rick very different things, that he forgave him, that he wouldn't take it out on Alexandria now that they had surrendered and lost their leader. That he'd downright go out of his way to ensure Carl and Judith grew up to adulthood.

The regrets had been immediate and he thought about putting a knife through Rick's brain before he turned. To afford him that last dignity even if Rick would never know about this posthumous kindness. Yet the same thing began happening to Negan as it did back then, years earlier, like a sickening, nauseating déjà vu. He couldn't do it. He couldn't put Rick down. Selfishly, he sat there, twirling the knife in his hands. He was appalled at himself for not being able to move and actually do the deed, nor even to order anyone else to do it for him. 

Rick looked more beautiful in death than he had any right to look, face finally relaxed into something sweeter than Negan had ever witnessed in his living days, even though there was still the ghost of the flash of angst that he experienced in his last moment around the corners of his lips and his brows, scrunched upwards in pain. Instead of doing Rick one last service, Negan dragged his corpse across the floor by the ankles into a jail cell with bars so he could sit outside it and watch the reanimation, like some sick masochistic ritual. He hadn't known exactly what to expect with Lucille, how she would become one of these sorry walker creatures. He couldn't use that excuse for Rick. And yet he couldn't tear his eyes away from Rick's form.

When Rick's eyes opened again, they were cloudier, paler than they had been when he was alive. Negan wouldn't tell anyone now, but he teared up at the sight. Rick eventually stood up shakily, but quickly oriented himself toward the one living thing in his vicinity and began trying to reach through the bars. Negan watched him for a while, taking a perverse, idiotic pleasure in the fact that Rick Grimes finally wanted him—wanted to reach him and touch him that desperately.

Negan hadn't coherently planned to keep Rick for so long. The days unfolded one by one, and Negan was kept busy with restoring order to the rebellious communities, and bringing Oceanside and the Scavengers under his own jurisdiction as well. They all had to pay for what they'd done, whether as instigators or bystanders. It was about optics—making an example of people so it wouldn't happen again—more than actual destruction of valuable property or people. He had planned to put Rick's head on a pike as part of that exercise, but never seemed to get around to it. His heart wasn't in it. He told the Alexandrians that their leader ended up perishing, and that he had been dispatched in the head against orders and buried in an unmarked grave. What possessed him to lie, Negan couldn't say, but he really wanted Rick for himself. Every night he returned to the Sanctuary and spent some time sitting outside the cell, watching Rick reach for him through the bars with desperate twitchy fingers, and trying to ignore the distasteful throaty noises he was making. Hell, he'd put him in his own room if only Rick could refrain from making such a racket all night long.

It was Eugene who told him how to stop Rick from making that godawful noise, without much thought, as soon as Negan asked him if he could think of a solution to that problem. He should have asked sooner. 

It took several skilled men from the Sanctuary, but they managed to extract Rick safely out of the cell and strap him down to a table without any accidents. It was Dr. Carson who punched a hole in the walker's throat to let the air bypass the vocal cords and stop emitting those raspy groans, but Eugene was the one who had thought of it. 

"I'm truly sorry, old friend, but logic would dictate it is no longer you, or what I am acquainted with as 'you,' piloting that carcass. Ergo the qualms I feel in doing this to you are mostly of the representational, sentimental variety," Eugene said just before the operation.

"And yet you're saying this to him," Negan pointed out, feeling strangely testy. This thing was still Rick. A highly defective, mentally diminished version of Rick, to be sure, but he could see the person he once was in this body, even if others were claiming they couldn't.

They cleaned Rick up while he was strapped to that table-- wiped his whole body down with high grade alcohol even. Carson scoured out and disinfected the site of his fatal wound thoroughly so it wouldn't rot away from that point, and Negan even had him cleaned out with a soapy enema, having seen his share of walkers eventually bloat with putrefaction within their gut. Carson had protested, still worried about possible contamination with walker fluids during all these messy procedures. Negan rhetorically asked if the Sanctuary had provided him with elbow length medical gloves. That had been the end of the argument. 

Negan wanted Rick more than presentable. He wanted him appealing. Forever and ever, if possible. The optics were important.

He had Carson wrap a wire around Rick's head and jaw to keep his mouth from making those pathetic snapping motions and then Negan shaved the poor bastard's face. Shaved him, and finally got to see Rick's face as he hadn't really seen it before. Part of him almost regretted the move, since Rick looked more babyfaced, less recognizable this way, and Negan really shouldn't have been aiming to alter how he looked compared to how he remembered him. That beard would never grow back, Negan assumed, so there was no undoing that anyway.

He stared at Rick now, watching how the poor thing kept lurching forward towards him, still restrained by its wrists but thrusting its torso and head well past the ends of the chains, opening its mouth with a determined energy. 

"I know, baby, I know what you want, but I can't give that to you, can't you learn that by now? No, you're such a stubborn thing. You don't give up easy. Never did before, why should you now?"

The sadness threatened to rise up again. There were so few people left in the world, relatively. Here was another one that would never be back.

Negan pulled the chain to send Rick's arms overhead again, and pull him back, closer to the wall.

"Let's wash up, Ricky. The girls are complaining, and we don't want our room to be a dump, do we?" Negan was cooing at him at this point, taking out the spray bottle with their homemade alcohol and spritzing it over Rick's body. "No, we certainly don't," he filled in a reply for himself.


End file.
